NH highschool team loses game to team with trans player

College sports

A Catholic highschool in New Hampshire recently found itself at the middle of the talk over transgender athletes when its girls soccer team withdrew from a game against a team with a transgender goalkeeper.

Bishop Brady High School in Concord didn’t forfeit its game Friday against Kearsarge Regional High School in protest, said David Thibault, superintendent of Catholic schools for the Diocese of Manchester. In an announcement Tuesday, Thibault explained that the highschool girls soccer team didn’t have enough players for the sport as a consequence of injuries and “some” students who selected to not play.

With only eight girls available to play, the college fell into disrepair by default, he said. Kearsarge Regional High School's athletic director and girls soccer coach didn’t reply to a request for comment.

“Every person is created in God’s image, with body and soul, male and female. Therefore, the dignity of every person and every student-athlete must be preserved,” Thibault said in an earlier statement. “This includes student-athletes from all schools, whether public, private or Catholic. Our goal is to participate with the best sportsmanship and fairness based on our faith as Catholic Christians.”

He added: “Any student who quits the game for their own reasons will be supported and never punished.”

However, Thibault didn’t say why some players dropped out of the Kearsarge game Concord patch reported that Bishop Brady's principal had received inquiries about canceling the sport in previous weeks. According to Concord Patch, a few of the concern got here from the transgender Kearsarge player's father, Marc Jacques sentenced last month to 5 years in prison for distributing child pornography.

Court records show that Jacques – who was scheduled to report back to prison in December – was rearrested on Friday after investigators allegedly determined he had violated the conditions of his release by possessing a knowledge storage device containing sexually explicit images pictures were situated. Accordingly WMURConcerned parents also contacted authorities saying they’d seen Jacques at his daughter's soccer games, although the news station reported that Jacques had no circumstances that prevented him from attending highschool sporting events before his sentence began.

The Kearsarge Regional School District School Board voted in August to enable Jacques' daughter and other transgender girls to participate on girls' teams. The decision got here shortly after a controversial law in New Hampshire that might require student-athletes to play on teams whose gender is listed on their birth certificates (the families of two other trans students are difficult the law in federal court).

Bishop Brady's losing game comes amid a growing variety of protests and debates which have followed New Hampshire's law turning football fields into political battlegrounds. Earlier this month, some Hillsboro-Deering High School varsity players didn’t take part in a scheduled game with Kearsarge, although the sport continued with junior varsity athletes supplementing the roster reported.

The Hillsborough County chapter of Moms for Liberty, a national conservative organization, did this struggled to roll back LGBTQ+ Protection, applauded the Bishop Brady girls soccer team for withdrawing from play last week. On social media, the local group described the players who abstained as “brave” and she praised for “say NO to unfair competition”.